Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a dental separator. Such separators are used for separating solids from a solid/liquid mixture that result in a dental treatment station upon being aspirated from the mouth of the patient. The solids include drilling dust, bone splinters, mercury-amalgam particles, and possibly also particles of dental metals such as dental gold, and so forth; the mercury, above all, must not reach the wastewater, for the sake of environmental protection.
For about twenty years, at least a substantial portion of the solids has therefore been separated out of the mixture; three fundamentally different options are available for this, namely settling heavy particles out by the influence of gravity, settling with active reinforcement by centrifugal forces in centrifugal drums or the like, and trapping particles over a certain size by means of filters, screens or the like. Examples are found for instance in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,018,971 and 5,613,851.
Each of these three options has disadvantages: Trapping solids with filters and screens inserted into the flow means that the pores and mesh become stopped up rapidly; settling by gravity demands a slow flow through the solid separation chamber, with as little impediment as possible, which is difficult to achieve in dentistry because the inflow rate fluctuates greatly; and separation by means of centrifuges requires much more complex equipment, with a drive motor, controls, and so forth.